Speaker: Haruka Kuroda
Session Title: Supercharge Your Interpreting Prep: Gain a 20X Edge with Generative AI
Review Author: audra lincoln
In her “Supercharge Your Interpreting Prep” session, speaker Haruka Kuroda shared her experience and knowledge about using generative AI to prepare for interpreting assignments and for interpreting practice. Her presentation was packed with practical ways to leverage current AI tools including ChatGPT, Gemini, and NotebookLM.
Personally, I found her walk through of using NotebookLM to be the most impactful and practical for myself. Haruka walked the audience through the process of using this tool to generate various study and practice materials. First, she highlighted that the program uses the files you, the user, provide it so everything this tool generates comes from sources and materials you trust (or at least control). Next, she demonstrated how NotebookLM uses that content to generate summaries, FAQs, audio content, and more. Haruka demonstrated how this can be an interactive tool and in her example, she cued up NotebookLM to create a podcast with 2 hosts discussing the information from the materials she uploaded. When the “hosts” used a term she didn’t understand, she could literally ask NotebookLM a question and the “hosts” would address her question like she was calling in on a real podcast.
Her session also explored how to use GPTs for text-to-speech audio content to practice interpreting and ways to leverage Google’s translation abilities to automatically create entire glosses at a time. What impressed me about this is that she demonstrated how to use a formula in Google Sheets to get the sheet to automatically gloss the source text terms. This can be expanded out to create multi-lingual glosses, as well. And if you need something more robust than a Google translation, Haruka demonstrated how to use AI to “look” at a website and identify key words and concepts to create a more bespoke glossary. This can also be done to scrape what Haruka called non-official (but perhaps more up-to-date) information and jargon from X by using Grok.
One more big takeaway from Haruka’s session was how to use GEMs. These Google AI agents that you can use to automate tasks. In her examples, Haruka shows how to build a GEM to retrieve company information (for, say, background research before working with that company). She showed how to use GEMs to expedite freelance administrative tasks like writing a business email, managing schedules, or drafting invoices.
And through it all, Haruka was very transparent about how these tools are not always perfect or accessible. The learning curves may be steep with some of these tools and to get the most functionality, you may have to buy a subscription. Nevertheless, it was amazing to see how an experienced interpreter utilizes AI to offer better services. These are tools that may help professionals offer a higher caliber of interpreting through highly-tailored practice before an assignment or help freelancers efficiently manage the mundane but necessary back-end tasks.
Hi Audra, this is a fascinating session and very practical and useful. I would like to have her present materials if possible. Thank you!!
Hi, Etsuko!
Many of the JLD speakers provided copies of their presentation materials. All of those (including Kuroda-san’s presentation) are available via the JLD’s mailing list at groups.io.